Monday, July 25, 2016

Holland Lake

Spent a week in Montana at a B&W Photography/Printing workshop led by Nathan McCreery, and hosted at the Photographer’s Formulary. We focused on shooting and printing B&W film. The Photographer’s Formulary has a full darkroom at their facility with professional grade printers. Learned a new way to shoot using the zone system and a spotmeter, developed many rolls and sheets of film.

The biggest lesson learned here is that making a good negative to print is much harder than making a negative that scans well. I’d been pretty happy with the results from scaning my negatives the last couple of years. It was only when I tried to print some of these that I realized that they weren’t actually exposed as well as I thought. This experience has gotten me to realize that I need to be more careful with my exposures and need to make physical prints more often.